1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to visualizing log files and more specifically to domain-specific visualizations of log files to be more understandable to a human viewer.
2. Introduction
Distributed and concurrent systems can implement complex control flows spawning multiple concurrent components. For example, in the context of Openstack a northbound API request to create a virtual machine (VM) is implemented by various components handling different concerns, such as authentication, networking, VM spawning. Potentially each component in the system can produce log files or traces. Analyzing a particular flow execution requires inspection and correlation of multiple such files, which is not particularly suitable to a human being.
One common way to represent flow information for concurrent systems is sequence diagrams. Sequence diagram are an UML technique originally intended to capture flows and interactions at design time. Some tools can generate sequence diagrams out of traces or logs collected from a running system. However the amount of information visualized is typically much greater, and can include multiple flows interlaced with each other. This representation of sequence diagrams is mostly concerned with depicting interactions and activity blocks, and does not provide any type of visual clues to allow rapid identification of desired flows. Thus, the amount of information is simply overwhelming and, though all the information is displayed, the significance or meaning of the information is difficult for humans to decipher.